1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to creation of synthetic radio channels using mobile and Voice over IP technology in combination with geolocation services.
2. Background of the Related Art
At the present time, many systems are known that provide for various forms of voice communication, including Voice over IP mechanisms, such as Skype or similar services. Typically, such systems require a user to log in and provide some identifying information about himself. The same normally applies to both one-to-one communication, as well as one-to-many communications (i.e., conference voice chat in Skype, and similar products). None of the conventional systems permit a user to communicate without providing some sort of identifying information about himself (such as a user name, user ID, or similar).
At the same time, it is empirically observable that many people want to communicate, under some circumstances, in an anonymous fashion, in other words, without providing any identifying information about themselves to other participants. One such situation is commentary on some blogs or news feeds, where anonymous internet users can comment about new stories or blog posts. However, there is no analog of such a system in the context of voice or radio communication.
Another reality of modern life is the need for people to dedicate a significant part of their daily routine to what is essentially unproductive time. For instance, for many people, a commute to work consumes anywhere between half an hour and an hour and a half. As a practical matter, there is little productive work that a person can do while sitting in a car, particularly while sitting in traffic.
Another fact of life is that people like to communicate, and often to do so anonymously—both to “say something”, and to hear other people, who are in some sense in proximity to each other and to them. For instance, when a person stands in a crowd, he can ask the question “What's going on here? Why is there a line?” The question is not addressed to any particular person, necessarily, but the information requested—why there is a line (or, in the context of traffic, why there is a traffic jam on that particular street or stretch of a highway) is of interest to those people who are in proximity to the person asking the question. There is, at this time, no conventional mechanism to implement such a scheme using mobile telephony or internet telephony.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art to enable users to communicate anonymously with those in proximity to themselves, using mobile telephony and internet telephony as a transmission mechanism.